Kudos, Garfunkel

Being a fan of reading lists, and always trying to read more and get all the classics under my belt, I have to give Art Garfunkel, yes him, some credit. According to this New Yorker article, Garfunkel has been keeping a list of the books he's read since 1968. 1,023 books.

So, if you're looking for a reading list to last the next fourty years, here it is.

Reading List 2008

I managed to read only twenty books last year, which is just a little depressing. I could blame the slow pace on spending most of the summer reading Ulysses, but either way it demonstrates that I'm not spending nearly enough time reading. Given that my bookshelves are filled with books still waiting to be read, and each year new books come out or there are other books that I learn about and want to read, I'd better pick up the pace.

I figured that the best way to to approach reading this year was to give myself a list. So this is the list:

Ward No. 6 and Other Stories - Anton Chekhov
High Lonesome: Stories - Joyce Carol Oates
Tree of Smoke - Denis Johnson
Collected Stories - Eudora Welty
All Aunt Hagar's Children - Edward P. Jones
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Pushcart Prize 2007
Light in August - William Faulkner
Best American Short Stories 2007
All The Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy
Lives of Rocks: Stories - Rick Bass
A Sport and a Pasttime - James Salter
Stories of John Cheever
Absalom Absalom - William Faulkner
Best New American Voices 2007
Death of Sweet Mister - Daniel Woodrell
Heart Is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
Gilead - Marilyn Robinson
Rabbit Run - John Updike
Middlesex - Jeffery Eugenidies
For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway
The Orchard Keeper - Cormac McCarthy
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Do With Me What You Will - Joyce Carol Oates
The Idiot - Doestoyevsky
Collected Stories - Richard Yates
Aloft - Chang Rae Lee
An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser
Mercury - Anna Kavan
The Liars Club - Mary Carr

It is an ambitious list at thirty titles, with only a couple of epic titles (Garcia Marquez). The emphasis this year is on short stories, including the year's best of collections and collections by some masters. And Faulkner, McCarthy, and Oates each get two slots because I've got some catching up to do on their back catalog.

So, enough blogging, I've got reading to do.

The New Year - The Old Project

I guess it's time to get back at it. And maybe it's time I remark on the progress of my "project." While at this stage of the work, I'm more likely to call it a novel, what it is intended to become, but it remains only a manuscript until it is published as a novel.

I had hoped to be done with the second draft now and I'm probably over half-way to that, but I feel like there is much more to do. There are more chapters to be written. Certain characters got short shrift in the first draft and they really deserve more pages. And I don't think I can be positive about the ending until I see how all the pieces come together. More may be necessary there as well.

The story lines of most of the characters all come to a climax at one point and it's hard to get it all done for them in that moment, at a climactic pace. I would like it to all be apparent in those pivotal chapters what is happening to them, what changes are happening, what decisions are being made, what courses are being altered. And I would like to do it all without chapters of denouement. I fear over-telling in that. It should also be satisfying to the reader, and I know much of the satisfaction in reading a novel comes from learning the outcome, how things have turned out for the main characters. Having an ensemble, like I do, makes it difficult. I'm reluctant to give them each a chapter post-climax so that we know what's happened. I don't think I can really get that right until the rest of it comes together. While I know that much work lays ahead of me, I remain anxious to get ahead, to write new things.

Book Review: Falling Man

Falling Man by Don DeLillo

There should be little doubt that DeLillo is a master of sorts. While I still have to catch up and read much of his work, this novel proves his ability. Falling Man is purposefully despondent. Surrounding characters touched by the collapse of the World Trade Center and taking place in the moments, weeks and months after the events of 9/11, the novel shows characters out of sorts. The narration is sparse, ephemeral. The course taken by the characters, the novel's plot itself, though, does not seem well thought out. The characters float, and I think this is also purposeful, but they float away from us.

I probably wouldn't recommend this book to someone unless they were looking to read more DeLillo or were looking into post-9/11 literature, but somewhere in the narration, the mode of this novel is a model for writing I would like to try in the near future.

Book Review: Returning to Earth

Returning to Earth by Jim Harrison

Though two other books by Harrison sit on my shelves, this was my first time reading his work. And I felt like I came in late to a conversation. It seemed to me that people who have read and enjoyed Harrison would see similar aesthetics here and be at home. This being my first experience with Harrison, I didn't get it.

There is beautiful writing here. Harrison manages to capture the landscape and the way nature infiltrates the souls of his characters. And though he establishes well the different voices in the multiple first-person narrators, it is this range of voices that makes the book disjointed. The only thing that really carries the novel forward is the notion of death.

Though I'm fond of mortality as a motif, the last couple of years seemed full of aging writers sorting out their anticipation of an inevitable death through their novels. Philip Roth in Everyman, Richard Ford in The Lay of the Land, and nearly everything Updike has written in the last decade centers on this issue. In the end (pun not intended), this Harrison novel did little for me but did not discourage me from giving him a second chance.

"... and take out all the good things I said about you."

Sometimes that New Yorker subscription actually proves worthwhile. This week it's the Raymond Carver special, with a Gordon Lish-free version of Carver's story "Beginners." And then they threw in a version with all the Lish edits (online only), an article on the relationship between writer and editor, and some correspondence between Lish and Carver, closing with this letter from Carver to Lish:

What’s the matter, don’t you love me anymore? I never hear from you. Have you forgotten me already? Well, I’m going back to the [Paris Review] interview and take out all the good things I said about you.

Maybe I'll actually get a chance to read all of this this weekend, and then I'll report back.

Book Review: Then We Came to the End

Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris

This book is appearing on all the best of 2007 lists and it's easy to understand why. Good books about work are hard to come by, books that capture the mundane and the inane like this one does. Even if the reader doesn't work in a similar environment of cubicles and corridors, we know these people, these relationships. And then there's the first-person plural.

I may have said this before, that I'm not one for novelty for its own sake. It seems that much of the attention that this book has garnered has been because of the point of view, that "we" voice. Now, I have of course read Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" and this book works in a similar fashion. Faulkner's small town and Ferris's ad agency both suffer from group think. The distinction is that for Faulkner he only used this voice for a short story, Ferris drags it out for the length of a novel. Getting a hundred pages in and realizing that you don't have a single character to associate with is difficult. And at that point the book's novelty wears thin.

The book was funny and quotable, some of the characters unforgettable, but in the end I felt about as empty as the characters, the agency's employees who just keep coming into work for no particular reason.

WaPo's Top Ten Books of 2007

Only two of the five fiction titles are the same as the NTYBR.

Finn, by Jon Clinch
The Last Cavalier, by Alexandre Dumas; translated from the French by Lauren Yoder
On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan
The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolano
Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson

Edith Wharton, by Hermione Lee
FDR, by Jean Edward Smith
Ralph Ellison: A Biography, by Arnold Rampersad
The Unnatural History of the Sea, by Callum Roberts
The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story, by Diane Ackerman

Neighbors Reflect on a Death No One Noticed

Neighbors Reflect on a Death No One Noticed - New York Times: "Ms. Copeman was upstairs, dead, curled in a fetal position in the hallway, where the police found her skeletal remains on Monday morning, said Peter Bishop, her nephew. She was dressed to go out, in a coat and a beret, Mr. Bishop said. “Winter clothes on,” he said yesterday, “so I guess she died in the winter.” Ms. Copeman had died of heart disease, the medical examiner said yesterday. The police said she had been dead between a year and 18 months."

Newsletter Update

Let me say this first, the service I had been using to send out the weekly blog newsletter, Zookoda, sucks. They were bought out by a company called PayPerPost, whose purpose is to have people blog for money by writing about products. As you can imagine, the company could care less about its free newsletter service while it's busy robbing the authenticity from blogging. So, the service has gone down hill, trouble tickets go unanswered, and the can't seem to read my RSS feed anymore.

So, I decided I might try Feedburner. The trouble there is that when you sign up (using the form on the right) you don't get a weekly newsletter, like I would like to distribute, but instead you get daily updates. I get enough email as it is. I'd like this newsletter to come to you on the weekend, when you might actually have some time to read and give the posts some thought (and of course you're always welcome to post comments).

For now, I think I'll do it the old fashioned way and dump the week's blog content into a regular old email and send it out. For those of you up on the technology and want to put satoriworks into your newsreader, there are now three feeds available:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/satoriworks
http://satoriworks.blogspot.com/rss.xml
http://satoriworks.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Thanks for your patience.

Updating the update: So, we're going to try Feedblitz now for the weekly updates.

Movie Review: No Country For Old Men

No Country For Old Men

Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy and produced and directed by the Coen Brothers of Fargo and Raising Arizona, No Country For Old Men had a lot to live up to. It wasn't very long into the movie, though, before I thought to myself, "Damn, this is good." It wasn't just that every setting was just how McCarthy's description made me imagine it. It was just that so much of it was spot on. The dialogue was just so real and believable. Capturing all of the idioms we use daily is a hard thing for writers to do, I believe. To hear McCarthy's dialogue come out of characters, many of them ancillary and insignificant, who look as rough as the landscape that surrounds them, is nearly to be right there. It is authentic. Or it has the feeling of a portrayal of authenticity, at least.

Tommy Lee Jones is always good, but as a tired and death-obsessed west Texas Sheriff, he is perfect. And the villain, portrayed by Javier Bardem, is creepy and unsettling, and his philosophy gets under your skin.

It really was an excellent movie, despite a couple of quirks at the end that escape the normal Hollywood conventions. I imagine some might be upset with the way it ends, but any other direction would have been blasphemy.

NYTBR Picks Best Books

So, not that any of the fiction titles on the list should surprise anyone, they all had great reviews and were all generally well received. What makes the list remarkable is that it doesn't include any of the big-hitters who had books out this year. No Philip Roth, no Don DeLillo, no Richard Russo, not even Alice Munro or Michael Chabon. The only real surprise here might be the Michael Thomas title. As far as the non-fiction goes, this should just reinforce that Emerald City and The Nine are both worth reading. Anyway, more titles to add to my wish list.

Fiction
MAN GONE DOWN By Michael Thomas.
OUT STEALING HORSES By Per Petterson.
THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES By Roberto Bolaño.
THEN WE CAME TO THE END By Joshua Ferris.
TREE OF SMOKE By Denis Johnson.

Nonfiction
IMPERIAL LIFE IN THE EMERALD CITY: Inside Iraq's Green Zone By Rajiv Chandrasekaran.
LITTLE HEATHENS: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression. By Mildred Armstrong Kalish.
THE NINE: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court By Jeffrey Toobin.
THE ORDEAL OF ELIZABETH MARSH: A Woman in World History By Linda Colley.
THE REST IS NOISE: Listening to the Twentieth Century By Alex Ross.

Book Review: A Stranger on Earth

A Stranger on Earth: The Life and Work of Anna Kavan by Jeremy Reed

Let me say first that Jeremy Reed annoys me. Every time I turn around it seems he's written another book on a subject in which I am interested. From my desk I see two of his books on my shelves (Chasing Black Rainbows about Antonin Artaud and Delirium about Rimbaud), so I'm familiar with his work. But when I saw that he'd put out a book about Anna Kavan, someone hose work is relatively obscure, about whom there hadn't been a single book written when I first discovered her, I was annoyed. I've read David Callard's biography The Case of Anna Kavan, and she remained a mystery. I'd always imagined myself going down to the McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa and pouring over her papers and fashioning my own biography of Anna Kavan. But then there's Jeremy Reed.

Reed is not an objective biographer, and that's okay with me. He clearly is impressed with Kavan's work and for someone who praises her work ever chance I get, I was happy to see someone else fawn over her phrases and to be enamoured with her character. He doesn't show her, though, from only one side. Reed, in fact, spends a fair amount of time on her problems with social interaction. She clearly had difficulty with people, though at times her circle of friends was quite large. Reed also charts the course that her writing took over the years, from writing, as Helen Ferguson, plain and not altogether really imaginative books, to the split with her former self, renaming herself Anna Kavan after one of her characters, and writing extremely imaginative, sometimes nightmarish, sometimes fantastical, always fantastic fiction. And he places it all within her biography, even getting into the difficulties she had at times with publishers and editors.

It is impossible to talk very long about Kavan without mentioning her life-long heroin habit. I'll call it habit over addiction because by all accounts she was in control over her use. Reed reasons her drug use as a mechanism for facing the world, for moderating her emotion. This is understandable. Self-medication is a method of coping for many creative types. It is this drug use that leads to her cult attraction. And one can easily wonder whether the drug is responsible for what is other worldly in her writing. I see her drug use as more than a tool for controlling her emotions, for keeping herself and the world in check. It was a method of escape. Just like the fast cars in her stories "Out and Away" and "Fog," it was a way of getting away, of escaping the real world. And so I think some of her writing came directly out of heroin use, which of course comes from an infinitely perceptive and creative personality.

Jeremy Reed seems extremely proud of himself. He spends time expounding on the drugs, clothes and music of sixties London with a time that says "I know all of this and more. And you don't." And much of these sorts of details are irrelevant to Kavan, being as she was cut off from the world outside her door. Reed also spends too much time focused on the fact that most of the men who Kavan kept as friends were homosexuals. While it is understandable that she might be drawn to these sorts of friendships out of safety, to avoid the men of the past, as a reader I'm not much interested in the sexuality, nor the style of dress, of her companions.

A cause for greater concern in this text, greater than my own dislike for Reed's focus at times, is his lifting from the work of others. As noted by Jennifer Sturm, credited in the acknowledgments of this biography and author of the introduction to Kavan's Guilty, in the comments of this blog, Reed appears to have pulled some things nearly verbatim from Sturm's work. In her essay, Anna Kavan Meets a New Zealand Writer on his Special Day, published in Kōtare, Sturm writes:

The couple forged a relationship in England in 1939, when Hamilton’s sister Margery began an affair with Kavan’s husband, Stuart Edmonds.

Reed writes:

In 1939 Anna met Ian Hamilton, with whom she was to travel extensively in the early war years, when Hamilton's sister Margery began an affair with Stuart Edmonds.

Sturm writes:

Hamilton was an expatriate Englishman who had travelled back to his homeland hoping to achieve some success with his anti-war three-act play Falls The Shadow , prophetically written in 1936....

Reed writes:

The conscientious objector Hamilton was an English expatriate who had returned to his birthplace from New Zealand hoping to score a hit with his anti-war three-act play Falls The Shadow, a work he had written in 1936....

Bothersome. I have to wonder if Reed didn't approach other sources in the same fashion.

As bothersome and annoying this biography was at times, I found it both illuminating and inspiring. I learned much that was not previously available about Kavan and her life, including details of her writing process, and it makes me want to re-read all of her work. Maybe next year.

What I'm Thankful For

National Book Award winners on NPR

NPR has a nice podcast of readings from the winners of the National Book Award. Damn that Denis Johnson book sounds good.

Also on NPR, Remembering the Turbulent Life of a 'Gonzo' Writer, interviews about Hunter S. Thompson.

Denis Johnson wins National Book Award - Yahoo! News

Congrats to Denis Johnson and his new novel Tree of Smoke for winning the National Book Award. This one is on my wish list, despite how difficult the NY Review of Books made it sound. I know it's no Jesus' Son, but obviously there are some things to like about it.

'Tree of Smoke' wins National Book Award - Yahoo! News

R.I.P. Ira Levin

The world would be a different place without Rosemary's Baby. Of course some credit goes to Roman Polansky.

Novelist, playwright Ira Levin dead at 78: Yahoo! News

R.I.P. Norman Mailer

I swear I'll get around to The Naked and the Dead at some point.

Author Norman Mailer dies at 84: Guardian Unlimited

Book Review: Guilty

Guilty by Anna Kavan

The full manuscript of this novel was found among her papers in Tulsa, the library I'd been itching to get to from the moment I learned they were there. It is, though, not the best novel. I've read some of her work that didn't move me, but others are among the best books I've ever read. This one, though, is worse than unmoving. It is not fleshed out. It reads like a quick first draft. The first-person narration is distant, as if told from some far-off, removed location, long after the issues raised have been settled. While scenes are described in this way, we are never given that feeling of being there.

Maybe this impression comes from a bias. It is easy to believe that the pages put together to form this new "found" novel are not pages that Kavan ever intended to be published. It is easy to assume that these were not finished pages, the manuscript not a completed whole. The novel's introduction, by Jennifer Sturm (whose has commented here previously) , does an excellent job as serving as a Kavan primer and properly placing this novel among her others. What I want to hear is a little history, though. Had this manuscript ever passed before the eyes of any editors? Anyone at all? Peter Owen, her publisher, was also a good friend. Do we really think she would have had trouble getting anything of which she was proud published? My suspicion was that this book was one of those bottom-drawer manuscripts, ones we think we'll get back to, edit, and revise into the masterpiece we intended it to be.

The novel does redeem itself, though. Despite, the fact that Kavan relies here on a fever for the narrator's mind to loosen, for things to become surreal and ominous, the effect at times is in full force, the images precise and moving. The ending is saved from the downward spiral we see in much of Kavan's work, and realizations reached are realistic and believable. Some might say that a sort of tacked-on revelation happens here, but what I read was heart-felt.

I would hate, despite what I've said here, for this review to turn readers away from Anna Kavan. Her work is mostly brilliant. Even her earlier "county novels" display enough insight and terror to make them worthwhile. Her collections Asylum Piece and Julia and the Bazooka are indispensable.

Movie Review: Into The Wild

Into The Wild

I had been holding off writing a review of this movie to give people enough time to see the limited release film before I colored anyone's view of the thing.

I usually like movies where the central character rejects society and ends up paying for it in some way with his life. But usually these people are artists, writers, musicians. I expected to like the movie despite the flaws in Krakauer's book. I was looking forward to seeing McCandless's story brought to life, McCandless given real and convincing characterization, but like the New Yorker explains, "Penn shoots the movie, however, in a facile, commercially lyrical style—he can’t stop swirling around mountaintops, as if he were selling S.U.V.s."

And these sorts of movies tend to be pretty melodramatic (think The Doors) and maybe incidentally campy. When I was younger and self destructive myself, I probably would have liked Into The Wild never the less. Director Sean Penn fails to see what was tragic in this story, emphasizing instead the beautiful and scenic. It is the innocence and naivete that makes McCandless's story compelling. But as the New Yorker said, "McCandless didn’t experience enough of life for his rejection of it to carry much weight, and Penn can’t see the egocentricity in a revolt that was as naïve as it was grandly self-destructive."

Into The Wild is worth seeing, and it makes you want to get out of doors, but as Krakauer's book failed, Penn's moving leaves us feeling a little silly for even caring.